musings on my world

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rejection

After the flat, crushing disbelief, I pick up the pieces of my shattered self and retire behind a huge wall. If they don’t want me, I don’t want them, I say to myself. I’ll never try to sell my music again.

It takes a while for the emotional shock to wear off enough so I can think and feel okay again. And this is a fairly minor rejection, in that my food and shelter do not depend upon making this sale. It’s not a public humiliation. No one except Nick knows that I submitted my stuff, and that it wasn’t good enough.

But as thinking returned, I began to wonder why I had submitted my music to this particular organization. The thing is, I feel so outside the general population and the way it seems to work, that it amazes me to think why I should hope that that world would want my productions. I not only don’t believe in many of the ways North America behaves, I believe they’re wrong. Entertainment media becoming more and more shocking in order to win ears and eyeballs for advertisers who want people to buy things they can’t afford and don’t need, to fill the already overstuffed pockets of a few multi-billionaires while most of the world starves. Wanton destruction of earth and air and water. Deliberate forsaking of quiet truths to build up scientific narrow-mindedness. Why would I care that an organization that plays by those rules does not want my personal, emotional, musical contributions? It makes no sense.

I’m lucky that I have a full time day job so I don’t have to make my art conform. I’m not going to starve if no one wants it. Deep down though, I want to communicate my thoughts and feelings, so I do want an audience. But there again, I have found people here and there who listen and appreciate what I’m doing.

Every time I think I can produce something that will sell, and I try to conform to my inner guide saying this is what people want because this is what sells right now, I flounder in a morass of helpless despair. Because that’s not really what I want to say. And when I say, or write, or draw, or photograph what I really want, no one, or at least very few, want to buy it.

I think I’m still waiting for parental approval that might come only if I can show that someone appreciated my work enough to pay for it. And I think finally, my eyes are opened enough to say fine, I’m not going to get parental approval. I’m never going to get parental approval. But I can enjoy my work, enjoy the process of producing my work and that’s what life really is about. No point in spouting my ideas about the true meaning of life, and then sneaking out the back door to secretly beg for handouts from the organizations and processes I’m criticizing.

So enough. I’m going to keep playing my music for me, and those who are interested, and make my own drawings and jewellery and photographs and whatever, and not worry about trying to market them.

Says I, so bravely, today, still dreaming of someone three hundred years from now finding my stuff and exclaiming, “Boy, she really had something there!”…